How to understand the desires of a child. “We enter different ages of our lives, like newborns, without any experience behind us, no matter how old we are.” Francois La Rochefoucauld Every parent is sure of what he wants for his child only good, but in practice - “what is good for Jupiter is not good for the bull.” Getting from the cozy womb into the adult world, the child is faced with continuous problems that disrupt his usual life. Now his heavenly life is over and real life has begun. Previously, all needs were fulfilled automatically, but now... you have to scream if you want, eat, it’s cold because of wet diapers, and if God forbid you get sick, existence becomes simply unbearable, there is nowhere to escape from suffering... But this is only the beginning of the nightmare of a child’s life, many adults naively think that only they have problems with their children, how mistaken they are, and how many problems children have with adults... Let's try together to penetrate into the soul of a child and figure out who has more problems, adults with children or children with adults. Future parents want a child and they have one, but what should the child do with theirs? I want...Parents, if they stop agreeing with each other, they get divorced, but the child cannot divorce his parents and he has to wait until he comes of age, and then there are new laws have arrived, now the states, and even the various conventions of society... And where is the happy childhood? Despite all the horrors of existence that I cited above, it is possible to live, and not because you were born and because you have to, but according to the law of nature, that is, to live and at the same time enjoy life, not only when there are no troubles, but constantly . Buddha said that all suffering comes from our desires, and he was right; we, children and adults, suffer when we cannot teach what we want, we suffer when we have to wait too long for what we want, and you must admit, the wait is always long, we suffer when we get what we want, realizing that the pleasure will soon end, what can you do, the psyche, like the stomach, is saturated, and there is no more pleasure... So what should you do, give up desires and sit under a tree like Buddha? Well, this is a way out, but fortunately not for everyone, and there aren’t enough trees for everyone! In my opinion, there is a better way to live, without denying yourself desires and getting maximum pleasure from them. I’ll try to explain how I do it myself and in my classes, my method... but it’s not really mine, before me it was used and explained by great and not so great people, they explained it well and because they themselves understood it. Following them, I will try, and I will explain how I do this, because you will agree that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see more. So, being only a small dwarf, perched on the shoulders of great hedonists, from antiquity to the present day, blown by the winds of your critical doubts - “here’s another upstart who will teach us!!!”, but not teach us, just tell us that there is a better way to live! Higher education – it sounds proud! But what is remembered when you look back at your alma mater... scraps of useful and not practical knowledge, it’s good if, on the long granite path of comprehending science, inadvertently, between sessions, a learned man flashed by, arousing respect not only with his regalia and frowning forehead, but also venerable love of knowledge. This is not the place to discuss why some give money “for knowledge,” while others take it... my task is only to try to tell you that knowledge is not sorrowful work, but the joy of acquiring something that no one can take away from you (except for sclerosis, of course). Studying... I immediately want to say torture, but why did it become so that the joy of visiting a university only comes from drinking with classmates, knowledge and the idea of ​​science, of course, has changed, but the goal is the same - to make life easier with knowledge!... But student life is not easy life, the one who didn’t buy the record book. Peter the Great proclaimed that learning is light and opened a window to Europe (thanks to him J) and the gloomy faces of professors stretched out from there, and all the local men could do was blush, with freshly shaved faces, we, they say,illiterate, all drunk and cheerful, and in sweaty labors, we only know how to shoe a block, and cut down a wall clock with a bird with one ax, and you look so serious - therefore, smart, you won’t be angry with us , you show us how, and we will repeat after you. Since then, we have been repeating after them, from the beginning of communism, and now we are learning capitalism and their Market, but we ourselves have forgotten how to live, all that remains is that the whitewash is bitter and life is hard and we teach our children the same... to live like us lived even worse than us... The gloominess of the West is understandable, the fires of the Inquisition quickly weaned people from the “joyful heresy”, but in Russia this fortunately did not happen, we had Petrushka the Fair, taught and amused people, and now it has been replaced by the Obraztsov Theater, with political satire, and local artists with their own delights, but does the soul really ask for this? Does anyone even hear her wretchedness? Well, if it suddenly howls, it’s not an hour, then we’ll drink it with a glass! ...And again it’s quiet, only discordant voices somewhere in the distance...So why am I doing this? Yes, all to say that it is not life that is hard and joyless, but a person sees it as such, gray and joyless, with flashes of forty degrees. But there is a way to live better, without cursing the government, without denouncing neighbors, which, they say, is beyond your means they live and don’t pay taxes, but simply for themselves, for their children, freely and joyfully, and this is not a new religion or a brilliant economic plan, but simply to perceive the world a little differently, not gloomily utilitarian, but impressionistically full (remember, there were such artists, and their cow is blue and the goat is in the sky), well, using the example of such a terrible discipline as a foreign language, in particular English, I will show that you can see the world through children's eyes and at the same time teach them something. the difficulties of understanding childhood, the reasons and content of children's play. (how Adults perceive it) “Having drawn my drawing No. 1, I showed my creation to the Adults and asked if they were scared. - Is the hat scary? - they objected to me. And it was not a hat at all... It was a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant! Then I drew a boa constrictor from the inside so that adults could understand it more clearly. They always need to explain everything! To which the Adults advised me not to draw snakes either outside or inside, but to be more interested in geography, history, arithmetic and spelling. So it happened that for six years I gave up my brilliant career as an artist. After failing with drawings #1 and #2, I lost faith in myself! Adults never understand anything themselves, and for children it is very tiring to endlessly explain and explain everything to them...” Antoine De Saint-Exupery “The Little Prince” Childhood psychology is the science of the peculiarities of children's thinking, behavior and development. Child psychology is a specific science that logically arose for the same reasons as pediatrics. Nature has not created specific viruses specifically for children, but the course of the disease in a child differs significantly from the course of the same disease in an adult. Likewise, child psychology is not a “simplified psychology” of an adult, but is an independent and even more complex science to study than general psychology. Psychology in its research relies primarily on experiment and observation, comparison of the mental norm and deviations from it. The analysis of the obtained information is carried out according to statistical principles. Statistics is the favorite daughter of mathematics, only it, forcing us to carry out more and more new experiments and observations, sometimes promises a Nobel Prize, and sometimes leads us to the brink of despair. When analyzing the material received, our own previous experience helps us and, of course, thanks to our teachers who led us to such a thankless scientific path. Popular wisdom is right in declaring that it is “an alien soul of darkness,” but with some effort one can make some relatively accurate judgment about it. As has already been said, child psychology is not a simplified general psychology, although it also widely uses experiment and observation, but with analysis everything is much more complicated. The principle of analogy with one’s own consciousness andconsciousness of colleagues, so successfully used in the analysis of fellow tribesmen close in age, is not applicable in this case. We, adults, retain in our memory certain childhood memories that allow us to assume that we understand what is happening in the child’s soul. Observing children every day, from the height of our life experience, we evaluate children as primitive creatures, simple and understandable. But is this really so? What do we know about childhood? First of all, these are our own memories, but are they reliable? We, adults, retain in our memory certain memories of our childhood, but our memories are very fragmentary and incomplete. The main danger of incompleteness is not in its incompleteness itself, but in the specificity of memory. A.S. Pushkin spoke beautifully about our memory, but you can’t argue with a classic: everything is instantaneous, everything will pass; <and>whatever passes will be nice... Our memory has the amazing property of losing unpleasant memories, hiding them in the depths of the soul and vice versa, the material that memory kindly provides us is exclusively subjective in nature. Our memories are greatly influenced by the remoteness of the events we remember. The further away certain events are from us in time, the more our attitude towards them changes. Just as objects far away from us seem in many ways different than when they are perceived close, so mental distance significantly changes what we remember about the past. Observing children and trying to understand them, we compare them with “ourselves in the past,” but those fragmentary feelings that remain in the form of memories of our childhood cannot serve as any reliable conditions for understanding the content of childhood. We tend to be guilty of a simplified understanding of childhood; seeing children every day, we begin to think that we understand them perfectly. But is this so?... Does academic training provide the proper understanding?... Of course, Shakespeare was right when he declared through the mouth of Hamlet that one can play the human soul without proper preparation with even less right than is possible in relation to playing the flute . How many times more right was he if we trace his thought back to childhood! If, according to the well-known expression, “another’s soul is darkness,” then how many times darker and more mysterious is the child’s soul... The world of a child is complex and unique. Only human offspring go through a long period of unique development, not found anywhere in nature, called childhood. Indeed: our neighbors from the animal world quite quickly go through their childhood, filled with a logical pattern of development from a primitive stage to a higher one. In humans, childhood takes a much longer period. And since nature has established such an order of life for us, it means there is an immutable meaning in it, although not entirely clear to us. You can understand something only by carefully and comprehensively examining the phenomenon, trying to penetrate into its essence, to understand what it is represented by. What is childhood filled with internally? Is it possible to understand him by observing what children are doing? In our opinion, i.e. adults who have forgotten how they once were children, childhood is filled with play and the corresponding view of it is as an empty activity aimed only at “killing time.” “Whatever the child enjoys, as long as she doesn’t get pregnant,” we think. But is children's play so meaningless? Let's try to understand this question, which, at first glance, already has a prepared unambiguous answer. The usual view of children's games can be expressed as follows: children play all the time because they do not have any serious occupation, which adults always try to provide them with. In the second half of the 19th century, the attitude towards children's play was almost the same as many people have now. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer believed that the reason for play is the energy accumulated in the body, remaining unspent, and this energy seeks a way out in aimless activity. The first person to seriously think about the essence and reasons for children's play was Schiller, in his famous “letters on aesthetics.”education" (1795!) Schiller connects the experience of play with the aesthetic life inherent only to man. Aesthetic needs, according to Schiller, are inherent exclusively to man, since they are devoid of utilitarian meaning, eh, he didn’t know about our smaller creatures decorating their nests and others. An animal works, he says, when it is hungry or in danger, and plays when it is calm and full of strength. Man is much more complex; for the sake of playing, he can forget about everything: hunger, suffering, consequences and sleep. Fortunately, man is not only vicious; the play of imagination realized in products called objects of art and having no utilitarian meaning, completely incomprehensible to animals, makes immortal, not the person himself, if we are not talking about plastination (Gunther von Hagens), but his hedonic name. So what is his place in life Are people, children and adults, interested in the Game? There is no single theory, just as no two people are alike. Some talk about gaming as a neurotic style of behavior, others as an opportunity to waste excess energy (Spencer) and many other theories. How many people have almost so many different opinions, having a common language to express thoughts, people rarely understand each other correctly. I am closer to the theory of “the need for active recreation”, which explains phenomena of various types and methods of Games, and also the so-called active or tourist recreation. This theory was first formulated by excellent representatives of the young, at that time, science of psychology, Schaller, Lazarus and Steinthal. According to this theory, in addition to passive rest, in the form of a calm state of muscles and sleep (by the way, about the completely unknown nature and properties of sleep: during the period of dreaming or active sleep, the brain works even more actively than during wakefulness. Freud believed that he had found a logical reason for this explanation. Sleep is a period for the uncensored realization of the most cherished, most unimaginable desires. Everyone knows that in a dream everything is possible, as in the most magical fairy-tale game. As for Freud’s pansexuality, let his opponents gnaw at his bones. in an activity free from rules and obligations. Everyday work confronts us with the gloomy laws of reality, which can only be violated in movies and in dreams. We are constrained by the laws of society, which should not be violated. Monotonous activity causes inhibition in the cerebral cortex, which we perceive as. fatigue and say that we “need to shake ourselves up.” Adrenaline (that’s a fashionable word), as well as norepinephrine (and many other hormones), are necessary for normal functioning and well-being. Monotony and monotonous muscle activity inhibit the production of hormones, and in order to feel better, you need a sense of moral freedom (by the way, alcohol is the “best relaxer”; it is a bad helper in this regard; dulling the sense of criticality, it also inhibits the production of hormones and, finally, simply poisons). In games, computers now perfectly allow this, everyone can feel like a Super-Hero, relieve muscle tension, and soar morally. As for the reasons for children's play, in my opinion, the psychological construct of A. Adler is best suited; using his concepts, children's play can be explain in this way: the game provides the child with a safe reality, which he urgently needs in order to act “like an adult,” but reality and adults do not allow him to do this and therefore, internally striving for independence, he loses his adult life, making a mistake, starting from the beginning. The game is attractive to all people and ages due to the permissibility of Miracle. You can start the game by making a mistake, which in real life could cost your life itself. (It’s worth reminding adults who are fond of gambling once again about this.) The game is attractive not only because of the possibility of a miracle; a game consisting of nothing but wonderful surprises would not suit anyone; an action devoid of content is devoid of meaning. The game imitates life, but unlike life there is no hopelessness in it. Child with.